Migration and mobility

Mobility is widely understood as integral to human freedom, so much so that when injury, illness or old age restrict our capacity to move we are commonly referred to as ‘dis-abled’. This is also what makes imprisonment, or even house arrest, such a profound and terrifying punishment. Whether nipping to the shops, commuting for work, or travelling for leisure, mobility is and always has been an essential part of humankind’s economic, social, cultural and political life. To be able to move freely is a good. Yet in an unjust world, it is also an unearned and unequally distributed privilege. Read on...

On International Migrants Day, all liberal democratic states will reaffirm their respect for migrants' rights. This will mean little to those forced into a living death by border controls and immigration policies.

Migrants in Morocco often attempt to cross the Mediterranean only after years of exploitation and exclusion. Their vulnerability is a product of EU policy and its preoccupation with ‘transit migration’.

Transatlantic slavery relied on force to move people, while today’s ‘trafficking’ does not. Vulnerable migrants have more in common with those escaping from historical slavery than those entering into it.

The question of mobility was central to struggles against the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. Current campaigns focus on the journey into slavery, overlooking the spatial captivity entailed in ‘modern slavery’.

Immigration rules in Canada are forcing out already-vulnerable temporary foreign workers. The measure’s class dimensions are representative of the injustice of Canada’s revolving-door system of labour exploitation.

The dehumanisation of transatlantic slaves has strong echoes in the UK’s current immigration regime, which separates families, denies parents custodial rights over their children, and condemns migrants to social death.

Contemporary anti-trafficking discourses are powered by a series of gendered and racialised binaries that silence the voices of the global subalterns, undermining their agency, and defusing their transgressions.

There’s nothing self-evident about ‘illegal’ migration. When borders become a spectacle of migrant deaths, discourses of migrants’ ‘victimisation’ by ‘smugglers’ distract us from the real causes of migrant illegalisation.

Beyond Slavery introduces its next issue on trafficking, smuggling and migration, arguing that mobility is central to life and that state restrictions on movement are the true threat to human wellbeing.

Beyond Trafficking and Slavery seeks to help those trying to understand forced labour, trafficking and slavery by combining the rigour of academic scholarship with the clarity of journalism. Our goal is to use evidence-based advocacy to unveil the structural political, economic, and social root causes of global exploitation.

Gendered, racist, classist, homophobic, and transphobic violence haunts the world of sex work. Sex workers speak. Who listens? addresses that violence, but it does so from the perspective of sex workers themselves. By publishing their voices directly we hope to help readers resist indifference and to become more critical of states’ interventions.

The BTS Short Course brings 167 contributions from 150 top academics and practitioners into the world’s first open access ‘e-syllabus’ on forced labour, trafficking, and slavery. This eight-volume set is packed with insights from the some of the best and most progressive scholarship available. Read on...